If an election were held tomorrow, not only would Labour win, they would bury the Tories with a landslide majority of 314 seats, leaving the Conservatives with a forlorn rump of just 69. That’s the verdict of an opinion poll from Savanta. Even for an embattled Tory party, the verdict is notably grim.

According to the poll, not only would former prime minister Boris Johnson lose his Uxbridge seat – there would be no Tory MPs left in London at all. Rishi Sunak would also get the boot from his hitherto rock solid safe rural seat of Richmond in Yorkshire. Every single one of the famous Red Wall of former Labour seats in the north would fall and revert to their former allegiance, and there would be no Tories left north of Lincolnshire. This would be a wipeout making Tony Blair’s New Labour triumph of 1997 look insignificant and would call into question the future, indeed the very existence, of the Conservative party.

Three successive prime ministers, like the Emperor Nero, have been fiddling while Rome burns – or rather, while Britain freezes

In the two years remaining to Sunak before the next election has to be called, is there anything, anything at all, that the new prime minister can do to avert this menacing rout and save not only his own premiership, but his party itself  from near extinction? Or have the Tories passed the point of no return?

It seems that the alarm bells are at last ringing in Downing Street and that the government is belatedly waking up to the yawning abyss that threatens to swallow them. This week’s announcement of Sunak’s plan to stem and eventually reverse the tide of illegal immigration addresses the second most urgent concern – after the cost of living – of voters in the northern seats that he needs to hold.

The Sunak plan may, however, have come too late to change the political weather. Experience shows that once a broad mass of the voting public have made up their minds that governments are making a mess of things and switch their support to the opposition accordingly, they are unlikely to switch back in a hurry.

It is not as if the government had no warning of the arrival of thousands of migrants on the shores of southern England after crossing the Channel in rubber dinghies. Today’s tragic loss of life after one of these frail craft capsized could happen at any time. This crisis has been building for at least two years and successive home secretaries have done little about it beyond bleating.

Instead of suspending Britain’s membership of the European courts, or taking the sort of action outlined in the PM’s plan, for many months the government has been merely warehousing the new arrivals in hotels and hoping the problem would go away.

Similarly, it has been obvious for months that a second major crisis was coming in Britain’s public services, and that the unions representing nurses, rail and postal workers and firefighters would take action in a bid to win pay rises for their members. It did not take a genius to work out that the probable time for strikes would be around Christmas when the services are under the greatest strain. Once again, instead of either outlawing strikes in public services or surrendering to the strikers’ demands, the government gazed into the distance and did nothing.

The public are not fools. It has become obvious to them that successive prime ministers, like the Emperor Nero, have been fiddling while Rome burns – or rather, while Britain freezes.

The most likely outcome of this cocktail of crises that – together with the cost of living – have led to the government’s abysmal unpopularity is a massive defeat in 2024. Unless he can produce some sort of miracle to cure or at least alleviate the manifold ills besetting Britain, the best that Rishi Sunak can now hope to offer his beleaguered troops is to mitigate the staggering scale of their coming defeat.

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